George Catlin was born in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, in 1796. He passed the bar as a young man, but by 1820 had given up the practice of law in order to paint professionally. Four of his small pictures were exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy in 1821, and six exhibited in 1822. Catlin painted the Seneca leader Red Jacket in 1826, and lived six years in St. Louis from 1830, travelling west in the summers to paint. ‘In 1836 he visited the red pipestone quarry on the Coteau du Prairie, concluding his travels in Indian Country.’ During the course of his travels the artist assembled a collection of portraits and artifacts, establishing an ‘Indian Gallery’ with the intention of preserving Native American culture. In addition to the hundreds of portraits, the centerpiece of the gallery as it was exhibited in the Eastern United States was a Crow dwelling. Catlin hoped that the government would purchase his gallery, both as a means of preserving ‘vanishing’ Native American culture for the nation, and as the first step in the establishment of a new national museum. He moved the gallery to Europe when government money was not forthcoming.

Catlin had been invited to Europe by Charles Murray, Master of the Royal Household, and also by Adlard, the London printer. He initially followed Samuel Hadlock’s lead, using animals to sensationalize the exhibit, and just as Hadlock had drawn attention to the Lapps he traveled with by using Elk, Catlin traveled with two Rocky Mountain grizzly bears. The bears ended up in Regents Park Zoological Garden, and died soon after parting from Catlin. The Indian gallery went on without them, and Catlin toured Europe between 1840 and 1852, beginning by hosting private views of the gallery for establishment figures, and opening to those of the general public who could afford the one-shilling admission on February 1^st 1840. Catlin’s London gallery, eventually enhanced by tableaux vivantes performed by locals ‘drilled…through the Indian method of walking with their toes in,’ made the move to the provinces in mid-1843. Catlin’s first removal from London took him to the Liverpool Mechanics Institute biennial fair. From there, with only a selection of the total gallery inventory, Catlin began a lecture tour. He exhibited the ‘necessary collection of costumes, weapons &c for [his] lectures and tableaux…calling together [his] old disciplined troops from the City of London.’ As Catlin followed this educational impulse with only a selection from his complete gallery, the bulk of his works were put in storage. He was soon urged, though, to reopen the whole gallery in Manchester, and it was there that Catlin’s operation was established when Arthur Rankin arrived with a very radical business proposition.

Rankin had traveled to Liverpool with nine Ojibwas from the Canadian shores of Lake Superior and Lake Huron. These visitors captured the public imagination in a subtly different way than previous Native American delegations. In London, Bell’s ‘New Weekly Messenger’ reported that there were ‘now in Manchester nine veritable North American Indians, real red denizens of the wilds.’ These visitors were ‘red,’ and this change in popular attitudes towards visiting Native Americans came at a time when visitors to London were no longer politically active, and therefore had little opportunity to exceed the bounds of their assigned ‘type’. By 1843 there was no political role for the Native American in the British capital, and Native American culture was brought to the British public as an undifferentiated curiosity rather than as a local reality. As ideologies shifted to legitimate empire in the public mind, notions of loyalty that meant so much in the eighteenth century were significant in a new and different way. As Bell’s New Weekly Messenger pointed out in relation to the Ojibwa party,

These remarkable strangers are all of the very numerous tribe of Ojibbeways whose locality is to the north of lake Huron in the vicinity of Georgian Bay, and consequently they are born subjects of her Majesty Queen Victoria.

In 1710 only the epilogue spoken at the Haymarket had seen the visit in terms of the glorious power of the monarch. By 1843 the Ojibwa visitors were born subjects, apparently fulfilling a minor role in Britain’s grand imperial design and expressing subservience rather than allegiance. The rhetoric informing the attitudes of newspaper readers was changing in order to support empire.

[Contact Me] [Back Home]

Last revised: February 19th, 2004.